3.1 Basic functionality

The text module seamlessly integrates Donald E. Knuths famous TEX typesetting engine into PyX. The basic procedure is:

start a TEX/L^ATEX instance as soon as a TEX/L^ATEX preamble setting or a text creation is requested
create boxes containing the requested text and shipout those boxes to the dvi file
immediately analyse the TEX/L^ATEX output for errors; the box extents are also contained in the TEX/L^ATEX output and thus become available immediately
when your TeX installation supports the ipc mode and PyX is configured to use it, the dvi output is also analysed immediately; alternatively PyX quits the TEX/L^ATEX instance to read the dvi file once the output needs to be generated or marker positions are accessed
Type1 fonts are used for the PostScript generation

Note that for using Type1 fonts an appropriate font mapping file has to be provided. When your TEX installation is configured to use Type1 fonts by default, the psfonts.map will contain entries for the standard TEX fonts already. Alternatively, you may either look for updmap used by many TEX distributions to create an appropriate font mapping file. You may also specify one or several alternative font mapping files like psfonts.cmz in the global pyxrc or your local .pyxrc. Finally you can also use the fontmaps keyword argument of the texrunner constructor or its set() method.